Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venetian workers and tradesmen would gather on a Sunday or holiday afternoon to battle with their fists or with sticks for possession of a bridge. Known as the "little battles on the bridges", these encounters enjoyed enough popularity to generate their own literature of poems, prose and etchings and were superbly chronicled over forty years by an anonymous source fortuitously discovered by the author. From these materials, and in the fashion of cultural historians such as Robert Darnton and Carlo Ginsburg, Robert Davis offers an analysis of these battles as examples of "deep play" that reveal otherwise hidden cultural traits about individual and collective honor, and the social structure of seventeenth century Venetian plebeian society. He argues that workers devoted themselves to these bloody, near archic battles as a means of reacting to the centralization of civic power and civic ritual in the hands of the aristocracy. The author''s unique material enables him to offer startling evidence on a range of civic and cultural issues. He demonstrates why bridges were the obvious locations in aquatic Venice for the public display of youthful virility. He also looks at the organization of the fighting and argues that the bridge battles over time moved away from mass popular melees into organized versions of early-modern sport. The public celebrations that followed victory at the bridge also throw light on the nature and intensity of civic festival in seventeenth century Vencie. And, most interesting of all, Davis argues that the authorities'' inability to control a popular event that it declared illegal over fifty times in a period of two hundered years is evidence of the chronic practical limits of state power and of elites wtihdrawing from involvement with the popular world. This novel work will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern Europe, Renaissance history, popular culture, labor history, and urban studies.
Industry Reviews
"Davis tells a colorful story with verve and acumen, and couches it comfortably in matters of import for the larger social history of pre-modern Europe."--Journal of Social History
"Davis describes in great detail this little-known feature of Venetian popular culture, drawing out its social ramifications. Based on a range of original sources and graced with illustrations and maps, this is an excellent study of plebeian life in early modern Europe."--CHOICE
"In this fascinating and well written book Robert Davis opens up a surprisingly new and challenging vision of the social world and violent life of late Renaissance Venice from the apparently humble and insignificant perspective of regular battles waged by artisans and lower class toughs for the honor of dominating certain bridges in the city. This book can be read as an exciting example of the new social/cultural history, as a stimulating prototype of
microhistory, as a rather different direction to take the history of sport, or simply as an intriguing read on the complex and still surprisingly unknown world of everyday life in the early modern period. Not
only is this history that is fun to read and think about, it is history that will be most intriguing to build upon."--Guido Ruggiero, University of Connecticut
"This is a fascinating evocation of the passions and behavior of the ordinary citizens of Renaissance Venice. Professor Davis vividly exposes the tensions that lay below the surface of that smoothly-functioning Republic, and suggests that the battles on the bridges provided an outlet for anger and rivalry that helped the Serenissima maintain its aura of social order and political calm. If topography and the involvement of all levels of society made
Venice unique, this account nevertheless reveals the roots of modern public sports events in the confrontations, the maneuvers, and the forms of popular recreation that Davis here brings so colorfully to
life."--Theodore K. Rabb, Princeton University
"This study provides great insight into a characteristic of the popular culture of Venetian society too often neglected in the depiction of life in this Renaissance republic. Davis allows the reader to gain a more complete understanding of the various dynamic forces at work in the social and cultural world of the 'Queen of the Adriatic.' This well-written and intriguing study will be of interest to both cultural and social historians not only of Venice, but
sixteenth-century society as a whole. Davis contributes to our further understanding of the complexity of this unique republic at a moment when it enjoyed the reputation of stability and tranquility among
the Italian city-states of the Renaissance."--Sixteenth Century Journal
"A wonderful microstudy of the social history of power, honor, and class identities. Marvelously focused, this essay is about big themes....Should have a broad and commanding appeal to a whole range of students."--Peter Arnade, California State University, San Marcos
"...Sheds valuable light on previously unexplored aspects of early modern Venetian society and raises intriguing questions about the relationship between elite and popular culture."--Renaissance Quarterly
"By studying the verified material closely in all its aspects, he has gathered much new information about the society of Venice and, in particular, about its people and culture and the relationship between the people and the nobility."--Journal of Modern History
